K Street Cafe

Today at noon when the U.S. House of Representatives convenes, you don’t need to be in front of a television to watch what’s happening. For the first time ever, Americans can see the proceedings on Facebook — and use the popular social network’s interactive features to discuss and debate.

It’s happening on the GOP’s Pledge to America Facebook page. The action begins at noon ET and includes the swearing-in ceremony and remarks by Speaker-designate John Boehner (R-Ohio).

With an increased emphasis on digital media, Boehner is setting the tone for the 112th Congress. New rules emphasize transparency and employ technology to make the House more open and accessible to the American people.

Among the other things you’ll see change today, according to Don Seymour, Boehner’s deputy communications director:

• On Twitter: @SpeakerBoehner – Of course Boehner isn’t the only Republican in Congress to have a new Twitter handle. Majority Leader-elect Eric Cantor (R-VA) will take over the @GOPLeader account and his press team will Tweet from @CantorPress. Majority Whip-elect Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will use @GOPWhip. You can find and follow more Republicans on Twitter via TweetCongress.org.

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By David Almacy

Last Thursday, Edelman released the findings of our 2010 Capital Staffer Index during an event hosted in the Washington, DC office. Edelman’s Public Affairs & StrategyOne teams interviewed senior legislative staffers around the globe in several capital cities including Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris and Washington to determine the role and influence of various communications channels both online and off. Below are some of my initial — and personal — thoughts about the survey results.

Citizen Engagement in the Digital Age

When Barack Obama was sworn-in as the 44th President of the United States in January 2009, much was written about his campaign’s effective use of digital and social media tools to build support, reach new audiences and engage younger voters. Many credit those efforts as being critical to his successful bid for the White House.

Once in office, it was largely expected that the Obama Administration would utilize similar digital strategies for government application. They set out to build on the foundation laid by their predecessors by seeking to leverage emerging digital outlets to better serve and connect with Americans while simultaneously adapting to a rapidly evolving media landscape. The same was true for Capitol Hill.

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First published on Partnership for a More Perfect Union.

You know something has had an impact on you when you’re still thinking about it weeks after the fact. And what happened recently on YouTube got me thinking.

Members of Congress and their staffs have gotten used to a world where a constituent writes a postal letter or e-mail or calls the office and the office responds in written form to the citizen’s concerns. One of the challenges that social media creates for congressional offices is that they can no longer just wait for constituent communication to come to them. They now need to monitor external sources to capture it all.

As Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers said in our “Inside the Hill” web series, “the world has changed.”

What punctuated this for me was the flurry of activity around a Senate vote regarding the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy. Regardless of what side of this sensitive social issue you come down on, something happened that should be instructive to Members of Congress, advocacy organizations, and citizens alike.

The Service members Legal Defense Network (SLDN) is an organization dedicated to ending DADT. They recently enlisted Lady Gaga, of…well…Lady Gaga fame, to create and post a YouTube video asking her considerable fan base to call their Senators to request an end to the ban on openly gay service members. This video is interesting from a number of perspectives, not the least of which is that, when she calls her Senators live in the video, she never actually gets through to either one because the volume of calls to the Senate’s phone system resulted in a busy signal from one and an at-capacity mailbox from the other. What happens next is even more interesting.

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A few days ago, a colleague asked for help with a predicament common in Gov 2.0 circles: how to educate her colleagues, managers, and clients to rely more on a project wiki and less on e-mail? (Broadly defined, a “wiki” can be as simple as a folder or set of folders on a shared hard drive or as complex as a SharePoint “component” designed to look and feel like Wikipedia.) For example, how do you get someone to check the wiki for a document rather than e-mailing someone else for it? Then, once user A has the document and needs feedback on it, how do you get her to distribute a link to the wiki rather than distributing the document itself?

The first thing you might do is survey your team. Why do some people live and die by the wiki, while others shun it? What’s helpful, what can be improved, what alternatives would users recommend? These findings can facilitate several next steps.

1. “It doesn’t work.” To the extent possible, you should tweak the wiki to fix any technical glitches and simplify any cumbersome processes. Such frustrations are very real, and anything you can do to minimize them will make you a hero. (Whoever invents the version of iShare, eShare, or SharePoint that allows you to download documents from a smartphone, no doubt will make a killing.)

2. “It’s extra work.” When was the last time you communicated the wiki’s purpose and benefits to the team? Holding a meeting presents two opportunities: it allows users to vent directly to management, and it allows management to say, We hear you; here’s what we’re doing about it; here’s how you can help; and, most important, here’s why we’re using the wiki in the first place. Plus, in the future, when the temptation arises for a user to e-mail someone a question, feelings of guilt may prompt the user to visit the wiki first to see if she can learn the answer herself.

3. “I don’t want to.” If necessary, a project’s senior leaders may want to issue a directive to use e-mail only after checking the wiki. Of course, these leaders should be following their own advice, and be wiki-ing themselves. “Because the boss said so” is a powerful motivator; “if the boss can do so, so can I” is even better.

4. “I don’t know how to use it.” Every complex initiative should have an FAQ document. Sample questions for a wiki: Where do I go to find X? If I’m inactive for X minutes, does the wiki log me off? What functions don’t work (well) using Firefox rather than Internet Explorer?

5. “Nobody uses it.” In the end, nothing succeeds like peer pressure. The more people you convince, the greater your chance of success.

Finally, don’t discount the possibility that a wiki isn’t right for your project. Plenty of tools exist to accomplish even the most discrete tasks. As consultants, it behooves us to remember that what a client wants is not necessarily best, and that the end is more important than the means.

Written by Kate Kaye, ClickZ Politics & Advocacy

Political campaigns are stuck on Facebook, and one Washington, D.C.-based digital consultancy aims to help them put engagement on the social site to use in more ways than simply collecting “likes.” Republican agency Engage has developed a set of tools for combining Facebook, social games, and Foursquare-style action-based incentives to driven online and offline activism.

Corporate brands from restaurants to retailers have taken to Foursquare, Gowalla, and other location-based services to capitalize on the check-in fad, awarding consumers with special symbols displaying their visitation prowess, and often with discounts or freebies. Engage’s Multiply product isn’t exactly a check-in service, but it takes a cue from those mobile-centric loyalty programs to build community and inspire activism for door-to-door canvassing, fundraising events, get-out-the-vote efforts, and other key activities driving political campaigns. The tools allow campaigns to attach a system for awarding prize points and badges to their sites, and connect with Facebook’s social graph to encourage sharing among supporters’ social networks.

The notion of awarding incentives to super-supporters is nothing new. The Democratic and Republican parties, as well as individual campaigns often honor their big fundraisers – if not just with cool names and bragging rights, than with parties or other prizes.
The tool helps campaigns track individual volunteer actions, virtual and in-person – from sharing a link on Facebook or donating cash to door-knocking. “The actions that score points and the number of points are flexible from organization to organization,” said Mindy Finn, a partner at Engage. Staffers can make note of who performs a real-world task and upload that information to the system, which in turn awards points. “For example, if there was a phone bank at headquarters, [you could] award 50 points to anyone who attended,” said Finn.

While points and badges are rewards for volunteers, data is the primary reward for campaigns. As the Multiply page on Engage’s site states, “User scores let you target your supporters by likelihood to take action – tied to their phone number, email, and Facebook ID.” The firm is pushing its Data Manager upgrade, which allows campaigns to “collect form data on your site and score every single action or form submission.” Part of the Engage pitch also involves volunteers registering with Multiply.

To read the entire article on ClickZ, click here.

Report: Facebook and the New Age of Privacy
(Fast Company)
A look into the evolution of Facebook privacy, from the F8 Conference in April to the present.

FourSquare and Seven Months From Now: Would Lincoln Be on LinkedIn? (The Huffington Post)
More politicians look toward the web for campaigning tools as midterm elections approach.

Originally published on Epolitics.com

Update: See also Kate Kaye’s earlier coverage at ClickZ.

Politico’s Morning Tech column has highlighted a clever use of mobile advertising in last week’s Florida primaries:

As the Sunshine State headed to the polls yesterday, down-ballot candidates bought Google online ads on mobile geo-targeted to specific districts, hoping to capture people who are doing last-minute research while waiting in line at the polls. Democratic State Senator and Attorney General hopeful Dan Gelber, who easily won his primary, used mobile Google ads for a 24-hour blitz on primary day. Lisa Small, likely soon to be declared winner of her circuit court judge race, also used the strategy, Google told us.

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Originally published on PMPU.org.

Clay Johnson, formerly of the Sunlight Foundation, wrote in his blog recently that “online petitions are a sham.”  He even used some of our data about congressional mail volumes to help make his point.  While I think that he makes some really keen observations and puts his finger on some of the key challenges, not all online advocacy is the same.

The Congressional Management Foundation has done research with both the senders (citizens) and the receivers (congressional offices) and majorities of both believe that advocacy campaigns are good for our country.  In fact, 73% of internet users who had contacted Congress in the last five years confirmed that they thought advocacy campaigns were good for Democracy.  On the Hill, 53% of the congressional staff that responded to our survey confirmed that even they (the ones on the front lines of helping Members manage communications) thought that advocacy campaigns directed at Congress were a good thing.

What’s more, our survey of internet users found that interest groups played an integral role in how citizens learn about and communicate with Congress.  Citizens join interest groups, visit their websites, and participate in their online petitions to learn about the issues they care about and to take collective action.  However, interest groups need to realize that they occupy a key role in the connection between their activists and the Members of Congress who represent them.  With that role comes responsibility.  On the Hill, congressional staff do not have the tools that they need to quickly distill meaning from the overwhelming volume of communications that they receive on any given day.

Clay is right that there are bad actors that don’t have the facilitation of genuine dialogue as their primary motivation.  However, we can’t let a minority of interest groups negate the critical and valuable—both to citizens and Congress—role that interest groups and grassroots advocates play.  He’s also right that there are currently some significant obstacles to meaningful communication.

It is specifically because there are these challenges, that we recently launched The Partnership For a More Perfect Union to help improve the relationship and communication between citizens and Members of Congress.  Through the Communicating with Congress Project we are seeking ways to improve the channel of communication between citizens and their elected officials because it’s good for citizens, Members, and democracy.

Originally published on PMPU.org.

The Congressional Management Foundation and its Partnership for a More Perfect Union present “Inside the Hill”, a web series that allows you to hear directly from Members and staff on how technology is changing the way Congress works. It is produced by Fleishman-Hillard.

In the third installment, “How and Why Does Congress Use Twitter,” congressional staff discuss the different uses and advantages of Twitter.

Previous editions of “Inside the Hill” are also available:

Congress and New Media: The World Has Changed

What Makes An Award Winning Website

The state of Maryland, the attorney general of Pennsylvania and a group of researchers are taking on political campaigns using social media platforms.

Maryland’s State Board of Elections is submitting a proposal on June 3 requiring candidates to include standard language on their Facebook pages and their associations with these campaigns. In addition, the proposal would require candidates to create a system of authenticated official Twitter accounts. If this proposal passes, regulation could begin as early as this year.
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